1. Field
The present invention relates to a sweetness enhancer composition containing a glycan derived from soy sauce.
2. Description of the Related Art
A sweet taste is preferred by humans, but a material containing sugar, such as sucrose having a sweet taste, has high calories and thus may cause metabolic disease, such as diabetes and obesity. For this reason, recent researchers have been trying to reduce sugar consumption by researching and developing artificial sweeteners that are free of calories. However, in many cases, since the sweetener free from calories gives off-tastes such as bitter taste, and the like, as well as the expected sweet taste, it fails to give a real sweet taste or enhance the sweet taste. Moreover, the existing artificial sweetener needs to be used at a high concentration in order to have its effect. Otherwise, the artificial sweetener has off-tastes such as a bitter taste, a metallic taste, a cool taste, and the like, besides the sweet taste, or its off-tastes are maintained for a long time, causing problems. In order enhance efficiency of the sweetener, the researchers have tried to develop taste components nearest to the sugar taste by combining existing sweeteners. Due to this, efforts on the development of sweetness enhancers capable of enhancing the sweet taste of the existing sugar have been made. Materials further enhancing the original sweet taste can have an effect of giving a high intensity of sweetness even with a low-concentration of sugar. Since this sweetness enhancer functions to enhance the intensity of a sweet taste with only a small amount of sweetener or sugar, it can reduce the amount of sugar contained in the food and thus can be applied to food or beverages with less calories.
It has been reported that with respect to the sense of taste in the tongue, chemical materials capable of stimulating taste receptors bind to G protein-coupled receptors, more specifically, a sweet taste receptor, a bitter taste receptor, and an umami taste receptor, to activate G-proteins, for example, Gα-gustducin, Gβ3, and Gγ13. Thereby, calcium flows into the cell through PLCβ2 and TRMP5 calcium channels, and thus cells having the taste receptors secrete a neurotransmitter to stimulate nerves involved in the taste and then transmit the sense of taste to the brain (Margolskee R F, J Biol Chem 277:1-4 (2002)).
During the last ten-year period, a sweet receptor for transmitting and controlling sweet taste has been found and cloned, and thus enhancers for further enhancing the sweet taste of sugar in relation to the receptor are being actively studied. Receptors recognizing sweet, umami, and bitter tastes structurally belong to a 7-transmembrane-domain G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) family, but have a distinct structural differences. In recent molecular biological studies, mammalian taste receptors may be largely classified as Type 1 or Type 2. It has been known that Type 1 taste receptors belong to a family C of GPCR, and have a large extracellular region in which a ligand binds to the N-terminus, similar to meta-botropic glutamate receptors (mGluR) and γ-amino butyric acid B (GABAB) receptors closely related with calcium sensing (Nelson et al., 2001). These receptors are divided into three genes, T1R1, T1R2, and T1R3. It was found that T1R1 and T1R3 receptors act together as amino acid receptors and it was reported that T1R2 and T1R3 receptors act as sweet taste receptors. In the T1R2 heterodimer, a venus (VFT) flytrap domain is linked to a transmembrane domain (TMD), and a cystein rich domain (CRD) is linked to T1R2. Several tens of synthetic and natural sweeteners controlling the structures of these receptors haven been pharmacologically studied. The sweeteners acting on the transmembrane domain of T1R3 are cyclamate and neohesperidin dihydrochalcone (NHDC). Sucrose and sucralose bind to VFTs of T1R2 and T1F3 and aspartame binds to VFT of T1R2 (FIG. 1). As such, development methods for the sweetness enhancer have been specialized due to cloning of the sweet taste receptor.
The existing sweetness enhancers or artificial sweeteners bind to these receptors in various orientations to exhibit efficiency, but they may have off-tastes, or cause negative side effects.
Throughout this specification, many papers and patent documents are referenced and their citations are represented. The disclosures of the cited papers and patent documents are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety, and are to merely aid in the description of the invention disclosed herein.